Crooked Media - What A Day: USPS de résistance

As the country passed another grim coronavirus milestone without a stimulus agreement in sight, President Trump generously offered up the next best thing: a handful of legally questionable executive orders to cut unemployment payments, trick renters into thinking they’re protected, and bribe struggling voters with a tax cut that they’ll have to pay back later. If that isn’t Mount Rushmore material, lord knows what is. 
 

• The U.S. has surpassed five-million confirmed coronavirus cases, just 17 days after hitting the four million mark. A new study found that nearly 100,000 children tested positive in the last two weeks of July, as more schools move forward with their ill-fated reopening plans. And with 30 million renters still at risk of eviction by the end of next month, Senate Republicans openly mocked the idea of providing them help.
   
• They’re in good (or, awful) company. Over the weekend, President Trump rolled up to one of his private golf clubs and took bold unilateral action to screw Americans over. His executive orders for coronavirus relief call on federal agencies to “consider” whether evictions should be temporarily halted, without actually extending the federal eviction moratorium. At the same time, Trump single-handedly cut unemployment payments from $600 a week to $400, and that’s only if cash-strapped states pony up 25 percent of it. Workers who aren’t receiving at least $100 a week from state unemployment insurance—the poorest Americans—will get nothing. The cherry on top: Trump said he plans to tap natural-disaster relief funds to pay for this, at the height of hurricane season. 
   
• Trump also ordered a payroll-tax deferral, not a cut, meaning workers would still have to pay that tax back later. Trump promised to make the deferred payments into a permanent cut, but only if he’s re-elected—a cute maneuver, especially considering that’s up to Congress. A payroll-tax deferral won’t do anything to help the vast majority of workers (and nothing at all for people who have lost their jobs), but it sure would put the funding sources for Social Security and Medicare at risk. Not only are Trump’s executive actions potentially illegal, they’ve seemingly derailed negotiations over real relief—the kind only Congress can lawfully authorize.

Just in case the illusion of coronavirus relief doesn’t clinch him a second term, Trump’s election-stealing schemes have kicked into high gear.
 

• On Friday night, the official time for Normal Above-Board Business, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled a new organizational structure for the Postal Service centralizing power around himself. Twenty-three postal service executives were pushed out or reassigned, including the top two executives overseeing day-to-day operations. Earlier the same day, congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy’s policies that have slowed down the mail (and the fact that he and his wife hold tens of millions of shares in USPS competitor companies, lol). 
   
• Further post office fuckery is still in the works. DeJoy has floated a proposal to increase the price of postage for mail-in ballots from 20 cents to 55 cents, in a bid to disrupt mail-in voting by forcing states to pay millions more when they can least afford it. In the same vein, the Postal Service warned that it won’t prioritize the delivery of mail-in ballots unless states pay extra. Meanwhile, Trump aides have begun exploring the possibility of issuing more illegal executive orders to disenfranchise more people: anything from directing the USPS not to deliver certain ballots to preventing election officials from counting votes after election day.

The deeper the country descends into viral and economic despair, the more single-mindedly Trump and his allies will work to sabotage the election itself. For the next 84 days, it’s on all of us to a) scream at the top of our online lungs about what Trump is doing to the mail, and b) commit to turning out voters in high enough numbers that the schemes are rendered irrelevant. Don’t fuck this up. 

On this week's Hall of Shame: Rachel and Rachna promise they are great people. Just like the Olympics, the Paralympics are ripe with cheaters. In 1996 the International Paralympic committee introduced the Intellectual Disability Sport classification opening up the games to an entire new group of athletes. But in 2000 along came the Spanish basketball team who were hungry for a gold medal and corrupt enough to win by any means necessary.

Think you know how this story goes? Trust, the depravity runs deeper than you think. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts →

The Bureau of Indian Affairs will force schools on Native American reservations to reopen for in-person classes. For all his all-caps tweeting, President Trump can’t mandate whether schools reopen–unless they happen to be federally-run. The BIA (which is part of the Interior Department) announced that 53 of its schools across 10 states must resume in-person teaching on September 16, ignoring the concerns of Native officials and teachers. Families will have the option to stick with virtual learning, but teachers will be required to teach in person. Native American communities have faced disproportionately severe coronavirus outbreaks, and many teachers and employees at BIA schools are at heightened risk of infection.

The New York Times Magazine investigated the drafting of a 2019 report on Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence the 2020 election, revealing the degree to which President Trump has eroded the U.S. intelligence community. The first draft of the National Intelligence Estimate (a classified document with judgements the whole intelligence community widely agrees on) contained the assessment that Russia favored Trump in the 2020 election. After Trump abruptly fired then-spy chief Dan Coats, possibly for refusing to omit that judgement, other officials softened the language of it in the final draft. That marked a disturbing shift in the intelligence community: a willingness to change the information it conveyed so as not to upset the president. It’s a devastating read on how Trump has politicized U.S. intelligence and enabled the Russian election interference he thinks will help him win.

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Philadelphia and other large Pennsylvania counties plan to set up satellite election offices for easy early voting, where voters could request and submit mail-in ballots on the spot. 

Georgia has changed its election rules to let voters request absentee ballots online, and allow election workers to start processing absentee ballots two weeks before election day to speed up vote counting. 

A federal appeals court ruled in favor of Drew Adams, a transgender teen in Florida who filed suit for equal access to bathrooms in public schools. 

The Black Resilience Fund, an initiative by activist Cameron Whitten, has already raised $1.4 million to provide direct cash assistance in Portland, OR.